Even in the biggest cities of Europe and North America, you can go a lifetime without hearing or seeing a word of the international auxiliary language Esperanto. No saluton (“hello”), no dankon (“thank you”). No ne (“no”). The scarcity of speakers has always put Esperantists at a disadvantage. The irony of their situation is plain. They are left defending the principle of a universal idiom in the very languages Esperanto was meant to supplant. So they talk up their literature in the language of Proust, Rimbaud, and Sartre; resort to German to remark how efficient and precise Esperanto is; proclaim its internationalism and exult in its flexibility—all in English. They sing the praises of its euphony in Italian. Il faut lire Baghy! Sehr Logische! Speak the World’s Language! Una lingua bellissima! Esperanto! But their enthusiasm is not persuasive. It seems to suffer in translation. Difficult, then, for them to press their case with composure. Incomprehension is the least of their worries; what they really fear is indifference. Indifference tinged with mockery. Esperanto? Didn’t that go out with the penny farthing? They are frequently mistaken for crackpots.
During the spring, summer, and autumn of 2015, I got to know several Esperantists. Denaskaj Esperantistoj (native Esperanto speakers), they had been brought up speaking the invented language from birth. The speakers’ names and email addresses came courtesy of various groups to whom I had sent brief inquiries in my own (quite elementary) Esperanto—a vestige of my years as an adolescent swot. There was Peter, a sexagenarian teacher born in Aarhus to a German father and a Danish mother, who proved to be a diligent correspondent. Another was Stela, a twenty-something whose other mother tongue was Hungarian. A few more would reply sporadically, half-answer a couple of my questions, and volunteer the odd detail, only to vanish behind their pseudonyms.
They were Esperantists replying to messages written in Esperanto, but Peter and Stela initially employed a strange English that omitted grammar and made their sentences gappy and curt. It was as though they wanted to keep the language to themselves. Each, I realized, was sizing me up. Disappointed in the treatment they had received from the media, they were wary of anyone unaffiliated with the cause. My credentials needed parsing. Who was I exactly? What did I want? My Esperanto, such as it was, went a long way toward reassuring them. Before long, their reluctance yielded to eagerness; they were suddenly keen to talk to me, someone who saw them as much more than fodder for copy. And Stela remembered her boyfriend, a Frenchman, reading my first book, Born on a Blue Day. La blua libro, “the Blue Book,” she called it.
Peter and Stela took me into their confidence. They switched to their mother tongue. I looked on their Esperanto sentences with something approaching astonishment. It fascinated me how the two of them thought and conversed so easily and naturally, just as if their words had evolved, accreted, from head to head, from mouth to mouth, over millennia. “To describe my Esperanto life is no easy task. So many experiences and memories. Which, among them, stand out? My mind resists. All my life the language has been a constant companion,” Peter wrote (in my translation—my Esperanto improved rapidly during our correspondence). Similar passages appeared in Stela’s emails. They reminded me of a twenty-year-old feeling—a thought until now unexpressed—produced by the library book in which I first read “iam estis eta knabo” (“once upon a time, a little boy”): this isn’t some funny made-up lingo, but rather human language in one of its most recent and intriguing forms.
Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, who dreamed up Peter and Stela’s mother tongue, was born in 1859 in the Polish city of Białystok, then a part of the Russian Empire. The son of a Jewish girls’ tutor whose works included A Textbook of the German Language for Russian Pupils, young Ludwik grew up in a bookish, multilingual atmosphere. At home, he spoke Russian and Litvak Yiddish; at school, he acquired some French and German, conjugated Latin verbs, and deciphered texts in Greek. Polish, though frowned upon by the tsarist authorities, he picked up from some of his neighbors. And since God spoke Hebrew, the boy learned to read its characters from right to left and to say his prayers with a good accent. Yet, despite this studiousness, he could not always follow what was quoted, laughed at, gossiped over on a street corner, nor purchase the family’s bread from just any market stall; on the contrary, in a city divided along language lines, it required nothing more than taking a wrong turn or mistaking one face for another for Ludwik to suddenly feel himself a foreigner in the eyes of a Belarusian seller, a Lithuanian loudmouth, a Ukrainian passerby.
Zamenhof knew from experience that in Białystok, a foreigner was often an object of suspicion and anger. There was the time his shortsighted eyes were drawn past a window to a group of long beards trudging up the wintry road that ran beside his parent’s house. Suddenly, snowballs coming from all directions pelted the stunned men a powdery white; the thud, thud, thud in the boy’s head was like gunshot. Through the windowpane he watched as the snowballs continued to fly. He made out the shouts of “Jewish swine!” that accompanied them, and his chest tightened. The shocked thought of the stones concealed within the snowballs made him wince. And when the throwers, out of ammunition, turned on their heels and fled, the boy heard them imitate the men’s Yiddish in contemptuous snorts: “Hra—hre—hri—hro—hru.”
“Hra—hre—hri—hro—hru.” The sounds galvanized Zamenhof’s imagination. A clever and high-strung student, he felt set apart, touched by specialness, and now he became obsessed with the dream of a unifying language that would make such taunts, and the prejudices behind them, disappear. It was the first stirrings of a lifelong labor.
Much of what we know about the beginnings of Esperanto comes from the early Esperantist Edmond Privat, whose readable 1920 Esperanto-language biography of Zamenhof—Peter in one of his emails had recommended it—slips only occasionally into hagiography. “Zamenhof had a head for outlandish ideas,” Peter admitted. “The brotherhood of humanity, all that mystical stuff. Talking our way to world peace. Absurd! Of course, a shared language is no guarantee of mutual understanding. No panacea. Think of the former East and West Germany. Look at North and South Korea. Even we Esperantists are quick to quarrel. But he was on to something: an international language could at least carry ideas across seas, alleviate prejudice, broaden horizons. And he hit on just the right way to devise one that was both as simple as possible, and as complex as necessary, to put into words every human thought.”
Zamenhof reached this “right way” through trial and error. He began by experimenting with a method first proposed by the Anglican clergyman John Wilkins in the seventeenth century and later written about in a little Borges essay: randomly assigning meanings to syllables. Each word arose from the steady concatenation of syllables and letters: the longer the word, the narrower the sense. Borges, in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, informs us that de referred to an element in general; deb, “fire”; deba, “flame.” Zana, “salmon,” was a qualification of zan, “river fish,” which itself qualified za, “any fish.” In a similar “langue universelle,” invented by Charles L. A. Letellier in 1850, a means “animal”; ab, “mammal”; abo, “carnivore”; aboj, “feline”; aboje, “cat.” Zamenhof’s own version of this scheme progressed no further than the sheets of school paper on which he jotted down line after line of unmemorable and barely distinguishable words.
Having failed at concocting an original vocabulary, Zamenhof busied himself with the idea of reviving his schoolmaster’s Latin. He imagined populations once more orating as in the time of ancient Rome. But the language had those annoying declensions, which got his homework low marks; he would first have to simplify away all its endings, trim a noun like domus (“house”) and its cohort of variants—domuum, domo¯rum, domibus—to a succinct domo. And then there were the cigars and the sugar cubes, the steam trains and the sewing machines, the bureaucrats and the rag-and-bone men for whom and for which no Latin word exists. The world had long since outgrown the Romans. And so, little by little, Zamenhof came to see his idea for what it was: another dead end. This realization, like his last, was a long time coming.
Finally, he settled on gleaning and blending words from all the languages that he heard at home, learned in school, or read in books. Each item of vocabulary would then be pressed into lexical molds of the teenager’s devising—the nouns cookie cut into an -o ending, the adjectives into an -a ending, infinitives cut to end in -i—so that the resulting coinages possessed their own look and logic: kolbaso (from the Russian колбаса meaning “sausage”), frua (from the German früh meaning “early”), legi (from the Latin legere meaning “to read”). There remained, though, the danger that borrowing from many disparate sources might produce a linguistic mishmash. Zamenhof was missing a means to generate additional words from his coinages. The breakthrough came during one of his walks home from school, when a Cyrillic sign hanging outside a sweetshop snagged the student’s attention. Konditerskaya, literally “a confectioner’s place,” bore a resemblance to the sign he’d once seen announcing a porter’s lodge, svejcarskaya—literally, “a porter’s place.” The signs’ resemblance, echoing the comparable function of the things they described, struck him as highly useful. Productive affixes like the Russian -skaya that marked various kinds of place, he realized, could give his nascent language further structure and help it cohere.
Words made out of such affixes dotted Peter’s and Stela’s messages. Esperanto contains a great many. In one email Peter wrote that he had been helping his bofilino (“daughter-in-law”) move her things to a new address. A prefix, bo- (from the French beau, indicating a relation by marriage), and a feminizing suffix, -ino (filo means “son,” filino, “daughter”), compose the noun. In another, he apologized for sending only a mallonga (“short”) note. Mal- means “the opposite of.” Cerbumadi (“to think about constantly”), an activity Stela indulges in—and a verb that I had never seen before—comprises cerb- (“brain”), -um (a suffix denoting a vague action), and -adi (“to do constantly”). Three composite words, and throughout my correspondents’ pages there were dozens, scores, hundreds more.
Words that, in another country, another century, had been put together consciously, one by one by one, from scratch. To almost anyone else, the scale of such a task might have seemed impossibly discouraging. But once Zamenhof started, he found he could not stop. From time to time he must have paused to wonder whether he would ever tire of it, whether this mania would ever wear off, but that never happened. A schoolboy’s hobby pushed to extreme lengths, the project consumed every minute of every hour of his free time. Day after week after month went into it. Alone though he was, the student was resourceful. He could be found flipping through the thickest dictionaries in the library, or compiling page after page of notes at his bedroom table, or asking his teacher unanswerable questions about which concepts might stick as well in a Malay’s memory as in a Frenchman’s. Every bout of progress in his tinkering, however small, however unstable, every newly conceived word or rule, gave him pleasure. Anno, his first pick for “year,” he ultimately dropped in favor of jaro, swapping a Latin influence for a German—or perhaps Yiddish—one. His attempt at saying and—for a while e—turned to kaj, a rare Greek input, and made him shiver with delight. He was overjoyed to discover, single-mouthedly, that keeping the accent on a word’s penultimate syllable helped with melody and ease of speech.
Mordechai Zamenhof did not share his son’s enthusiasm. He hated the gibberish the boy came out with; he hated the many wasted hours diverted from studies—he had him down as a future doctor. Always on the edge of anger, he frowned and sighed and more than once gave Ludwik a stern talking-to. But Ludwik would not listen to reason. His refusal induced panic in his father. Would his eldest son shirk respectability for such a harebrained scheme?
Mordechai spoke to his son’s schoolmaster. In his long service of children’s education, he would have seen many a boyish eccentricity, many a hobby gone wrong. The schoolmaster confirmed the father’s fears. The lad hadn’t a sane nerve in his brain. Only madmen behaved likewise, wasting their lives on pointless pursuits. A serious scholar knew better than to mix and muddle languages. Soon rumors flew around the school that the Zamenhof boy was definitely cracked.
Ludwik could not stop—but for two years he had to. The hiatus was occasioned by his being sent away to Moscow to read medicine. In his absence, bales of notes—every trace of his years of solitary labor—went to cinders in his father’s fireplace. Mordechai was determined not to have his family made into a laughingstock. But what he destroyed, Ludwik, on his return, restored word by word from memory. He packed his folders and bags for Warsaw, where he set up a modest ophthalmological practice, and became engaged to a soap manufacturer’s daughter. At last he was free. He divided his time between eyeglasses-fitting, fiancée-squeezing, and putting the finishing touches to his “universala lingvo.”
In ten years, Zamenhof’s creation had gone from a few lines to a language, complete with nouns, pronouns, verbs, proverbs, adjectives, synonyms, rhymes. The only thing it was now lacking were speakers. So he drew up a forty-page pamphlet—a guide like the one his father had written for Jewish girls wanting to talk like Fräulein—and published it in 1887 under the title (in Cyrillic) International Language. Foreword and Complete Textbook (for Russian Speakers). He was only twenty-eight. His nom de plume was Doktoro Esperanto (“Doctor Hoper”).
Peter and Stela, to my surprise, had never looked at Zamenhof’s pamphlet, the original Esperanto primer. Not that they did not read in Esperanto—Peter mentioned owning or having owned La Grafo de Monte-Kristo, a translation of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo; a short story collection, La Bato (The Boat), by Lena Karpunina; early Esperanto novels, such as Mr. Tot Aĉetas Mil Okulojn (Mr. Tot Buys a Thousand Eyes), by Jean Forge, and Sur Sanga Tero (On Bloody Soil), by Julio Baghy; and the poet William Auld’s epic La Infana Raso (The Infant Race), among others. Stela had long ago read her Esperanto edition of Winnie-the-Pooh—Winnie la Pu—to pieces. But like most contemporary Esperantists, the two were unaware of the primer’s contents and unmoved by its history. And indeed, when I read a digitized version of the pamphlet, I saw that it had hardly aged well. Its opening sentence—the first published in the language—is the stiff and baffling “Mi ne scias kie mi lasis la bastonon; ĉu vi ĝin ne vidis?” (“I do not know where I left the stick; have you not seen it?”). And then there is the odd tone throughout: earnest, touchy, glib. Zamenhof, full of his setbacks and frustrations, had infused the pamphlet’s list of vocabulary with them: fighting words like bati (“to flog”), batali (“to fight”), bruli (“to burn”), ĉagreni (“to chagrin”), detri (“to destroy”), disputi (“to quarrel”), insulti (“to insult”), militi (“to struggle”), ofendi (“to wrong”), puni (“to punish”), ŝanceli (“to stagger”), trompi (“to deceive”), turmenti (“to torment”), venki (“to vanquish”) abounded. A few years had sufficed to put many others out of date: ekbruligu la kandelon (“light the candle”), kaleŝo (“horse-drawn carriage”), ŝtrumpo (“stocking”), telegrafe (“telegraphically”), lavistino (“washerwoman”).
But many saw the pamphlet differently at the time of its publication, having never seen anything of its like before. In the 1880s, voices the world over were crying out to be heard and understood. Geographic distance muffled them. Incomprehension among nations garbled them. So when the upper classes read the brand-new project in translation, they hailed “Doctor Hoper” as a pioneer on the level of Bell and Edison. The pamphlet made them utopian. Esperanto quickly became a household word among the wealthy. Within a year or two, thousands were relearning how to say their name (mia nomo estas… ), ask questions (Ĉu vi…?), and count to ten: unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin…
Presently, letters addressed to the Doktoro in Warsaw started arriving. One correspondent complained that “en mia urbo ĝis nun neniu ankoraŭ ion scias pri la lingvo Esperanto” (“in my town to this day not one person knows anything about the Esperanto language”). Another wrote to ask whether it was correct to say la malfeliĉo faris lin prudenta (“misfortune made him prudent”) or la malfeliĉo faris lin prudentan (Zamenhof replied “both”), and went on to sniff that “la signetoj superleteraj estas maloportunaj en la skribado” (“the superscript characters are inconvenient when writing”). But most of the letters were laudatory. A gentleman from Birkenhead, England, asked to receive more Esperantist publications, a request echoed in mail from Philadelphia and Paris. A novice in Kiev wrote a single line to commend the project as tre interesa (“very interesting”). A dentist in Saratov proposed a translation of Gogol. Zamenhof must have been delighted by the sight of his words in other hands. And not long after he began receiving the letters, he heard his creation spoken back to him. Antoni Grabowski was the speaker’s name. He was a chemical engineer, turning thirty, who had Zamenhof’s mustache and goatee and also his passion for languages. He had examined the pamphlet with the near-sighted attention he usually reserved for blueprints. He was smitten. He became an instant convert to Esperanto. He took a train to Warsaw, sought out the author’s house, and knocked on the door. A thin, little, prematurely bald man opened. Zamenhof listened with dazzled pleasure to the stranger’s stuttering yet familiar sentences and welcomed him inside. Alas for history, their exchange went unrecorded—neither man thought to commit it to paper; for the following reconstruction I have leaned on a near-contemporary textbook by Grabowski on conversational manners:
“Ĉu vi estus Sinjoro Zamenhof?” [“Are you Mr. Zamenhof?”]
“Jes!” [“Yes!”]
“Sinjoro, mi havas la honoron deziri al vi bonan tagon.” [“Sir, I have the honor of wishing you good day.”]
“Envenu, mi petas. Sidiĝu. Kiel vi fartas?” [“Come in, please. Take a seat. How are you?”]
“Tre bone, sinjoro, mi dankas. Kaj vi?” [“Very well, sir, thank you. And you?”]
“Mi fartas tre bone.” [“I am very well.”]
“Mi ĝojas vin renkonti.” [“I am delighted to meet you.”]
“Vi estas tre ĝentila.” [“You are very kind.”]
“Volu preni mian karton de vizito.” [“Please take my business card.”]
“Ĉu mi povas proponi al vi kafon aŭ teon?” [“May I offer you coffee or tea?”]
I can imagine Zamenhof saying something like this out of habit, without reflecting, since outside books, tea would still have been something of a rarity in those parts.
“Kafon.” [“Coffee.”]
“Ĉu vi deziras kremon?” [“Do you want cream?”]
“Ne, mi trinkas nur kafon nigran.” [“No, I only drink black coffee.”]
And after the niceties, the two men presumably got down to business. Probably they talked about the pamphlet, discussed ways to further the cause, or went over some of the finer points of Esperanto grammar. They would have refrained from straying into politics, let alone matters of the heart. The conversation would have talked itself out after half an hour or so.
The letters! The conversation over coffee! Fervently, Zamenhof believed that his was an idea whose time had come. He pictured mouths by the thousand, million, rushing to pronounce his every sentence, foresaw the irresistible triumph of his utopia. He conceived it to be a revolution. Instead, it became merely a fashion. British publishers, angling for column inches, put out tiny print runs of Teach Yourself Esperanto phrasebooks. Continental hosts who wanted to impress their guests recited a few lines over wine and canapés. American dabblers in table-turning and simplified spelling switched fads. Every effort failed to turn these fair-weather speakers into dues-paying members. Most would not put their money where their mouths were. Most soon forgot the little they had once so enthusiastically learned. Months passed, years, and still no utopia. Zamenhof found himself with hardly a kopeck in his pocket; Esperanto had eaten all five thousand rubles of his wife’s dowry.
His health was equally poor. He had to think about his heart. His heart was bad. People were surprised when he gave his age. Too much tobacco. Too little sleep. He had next to no appetite. He was always correcting some error-strewn letter, pulling together an exhorting sermon, thinking up another coinage. His life was one long language lesson.
Yet, increasingly, it must have seemed to Zamenhof that the teaching was being taken out of his hands. Ten years after his pamphlet, the center of the Esperanto-speaking world had moved westward to France. France became an economic lifeline: its intelligentsia subscribed many francs for the publication of periodicals. But the intellectuals also proposed to edit them as they saw fit. Strikingly ugly they thought the diacritics, those circumflexed h’s and s’s and the other supersigned characters, which continue to give today’s keyboards hiccups; they wished to get rid of them. Zamenhof said he was willing to entertain the possibility. And there were other things the patrons wanted changed. They wanted the language to look more like Italian: don’t say du libroj (“two books”) but du libri. Again, Zamenhof said he could live with the idea. Adjectives, they added, should no longer have to agree with the nouns they described: don’t say grandaj libroj (“big books”) but granda libri. Nor, for that matter, should the object of a sentence require an n: not mi legas grandan libron (“I’m reading a big book”) but mi legas granda libro. Zamenhof demurred. Dropping the diacritics and modifying words he could accept in principle; altering the way sentences worked, however, he could not.
The squabble continued on and off for years. In the end, the movement split into a mainstream of conservatives, led by Zamenhof, and a minority of reformers—tinkerers, to the conservatives—determined to do away with what they thought of as the creator’s mistakes. The conservatives did away with them instead. Esperanto survived, but Zamenhof’s optimism was shaken. In 1914, World War I broke out. Three years later, he died.
Peter: “One day, not long after the Great War, the village chimney sweep told my father all about an ‘easy-to-learn international language.’ My father had little schooling, but he could read, so he looked up and found an Esperanto course in the pages of the popular encyclopedia Die Neue Volkshochschule.” The four-volume work also taught its readers stenography, graphology, hygiene, sport, and art, among other topics. “Later, he moved to the city, Hamburg, and became a policeman; he was active on the Esperanto scene there.”
Weimar Germany, in the 1920s, was a land of strikes and uprisings, anger and hunger. The country was rife with anti-Semitic feeling. For German speakers of Esperanto, whose creator had been a Jewish Russo-Pole, it was a hard place to live. Racist slurs needed ignoring whenever they exchanged greetings in a busy street, shared news and anxieties, or gathered in someone’s apartment or a public hall to commemorate Zamenhof’s birthday. As early as 1926, Peter’s father could have read in the national weekly Der Reichswart that Esperanto was a “freak of a language, without roots in the life of a people… part of Zionist plans to dominate the world, and aid Zion’s slaves to destroy the Fatherland.” During a 1928 debate in the Bavarian state assembly about the possible introduction of Esperanto courses into German schools, the National Socialist deputy Rudolf Buttman put on record his contention that Esperanto was “a Jew’s cobbled-together language, a thorn in the side of German culture.” The National Socialists’ own newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter, complained in 1930 that some Germans were “babbling” the language of “the bloodsucking internationalists.”
Internationalist tendencies. It was for these that Peter’s father was thrown out of the police force in 1932. Even among his fellow Esperantists he could find no refuge. Many, trying to accommodate themselves to the new regime, aping its bigotry, expelled “Jews, pacifists, profiteers” from their clubs. The clubs did not last long: in 1935 the National Socialist Minister Bernhard Rust closed them all down. Around the same time, a ban was enforced on letters written in either Esperanto or Hebrew. By then, Peter’s father had fled for Holland, then for Norway, then for Denmark, where he taught beginning Esperanto for a living. “One of his students was my future mother. They married in 1937. After the German occupation, my father became an army chauffeur. He drove the military brass around and kept his head down. When the war started going wrong for the Nazis, he got called up, but he managed to wriggle out of it. His speaking Danish saved him: an interpreter was far more valuable to them than simply another pair of boots.”
Peter was born in his mother’s hometown in 1947. In the following year, his father moved back with his wife and son to Hamburg. In Hamburg, the father returned to his policeman’s green uniform, his daily rounds, and his Esperanto club, where he taught evening classes. The family home was like a continuation of those classes: Peter would sit with Eliza, his kid sister, eating not Brot, Liverwurst, and Marmalade at the kitchen table but pano, hepatokolbaso, and marmelado. Brother and sister learned to speak their Esperanto with the father’s earthy, Plattdeutsch accent. “His Esperanto skimped on any finery. No wonder, since my father hailed from a little burg inhospitable to education. His speech lacked the nuances of the well-schooled man.” From their early childhood, Peter and his sister were regular clubgoers. He recalls smiling inwardly at the adults’ blunders. “On rare occasions, I would even catch my father—a very active instructor—teach some point of grammar inaccurately (I didn’t dare say anything).”
In one of his messages, Peter attached a color photograph of himself as a small, blond, rosy-cheeked boy. The boy is dressed in a tie and beige shorts, his white socks pulled right up to the knees. To his left, in the center, stands his father, rosy-cheeked and dark-suited, displaying proudly a child’s drawing of the literary character Struwwelpeter. Behind Peter, a Christmas tree glitters. On the far left, his public: girls and women who sit or stand and beam. “I was five. I had had to learn by heart the story of Struwwelpeter in Esperanto.” At his parents’ club, he recited poems, sang songs, performed sketches. Sometimes foreign Esperantists came to visit. “If my memory serves me right, I spoke fluently with them—as fluently as any small child could.”
Outside the home and club he was shyer. “Once, during a tram ride, my parents and I were talking together in Danish (my mother always spoke to me in her native tongue) when a Danish passenger joined in. I did not like the sound of him. I turned my back on the interrupter and carried on in Esperanto.”
He began attending international Esperantist gatherings at the age of nine. “In 1956, I took part in the first Children’s Congress. It was held in Denmark.” Peter mixed with some thirty other children. One of the boys, about his age, had flown in from Texas. The Texan wore a cowboy suit, with a red sombrero on which someone had embroidered an eagle. The two started talking. “That we chatted in Esperanto seemed normal—in no way remarkable.” The boys shared a group visit to the zoological garden in Copenhagen. “But all that time I could not take my mind off that hat!” After returning to Hamburg, Peter’s parents took him as usual on their weekly visit to the club. “Turned out the boy’s family had dropped in there on their way home to the States; they had left the cowboy hat there for me as a gift. I was very proud.”
Before his teens he had never given a thought to the language. “For the first time I became aware of its rules. I began speaking more slowly, asking myself whether I had to cap this or that word with an -n.” More and more, he found himself needled by grammatical scruples: should he say such-and-such sentence like this or like that? How could he know for certain whether what he was saying made complete sense? It was a phase he seems to have quickly grown out of. “I began to travel by myself. My confidence increased. I spent six weeks holidaying in Finland. I had no Finnish. My Danish and German were useless. And yet I never felt like a tourist. Unlike campers who have little contact with the country, I ate and slept in the homes of Finnish Esperantist families. My Esperanto was a passport to the world.”
Peter has spent the greater part of his life traveling. “I have spoken Esperanto in Germany, Denmark, France, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Australia, Britain, Spain, China, Nepal, Iceland, and the United States.” In Croatia, he met his first wife. “It was during an Esperantist seminar. She spoke no German, and I no Croatian.” Her Esperanto charmed him. “The Serbs and Croats are the best pronouncers.” They whispered sweet nothings, gossiped with each other, disputed memories, all in the language. Their marriage was childless; Peter later adopted a boy and a girl. “My son lives only for football. As for my daughter, she was already an adult; I only managed to teach her a smattering of words. I suppose, from the movement’s viewpoint, I haven’t been a very successful Esperanto parent.”
His sister has had more success. He told me, “My niece and nephew are both native speakers. But, from what I can gather, the boy has let his Esperanto go. My niece married a native speaker but they aren’t active in the movement.” He and his sister are no longer on speaking terms.
In all our exchanges Peter struck me as a man who lived for the cause. He had written many polite, rectifying letters to the papers. “For many years I subscribed to Die Zeit, and would write in from time to time about Esperanto. An editor finally replied to inform me that the paper’s policy forbade him to publish anything positive about the language. Times change, though, and gradually mention of Esperanto is creeping back into print.” He was not, he insisted, a proselytizer. “I don’t conceal my convictions. I often wear a lapel pin showing the movement’s green flag. But I don’t go in for preaching.”
At fifty, he decided to return to his birthplace; he now lives an hour’s drive from Copenhagen. “I can go for days without speaking a word of Esperanto. The nearest club is in the capital, and I only rarely venture over. The language is more for the telephone, and the computer.” He splits his life between his three native tongues. “I do all my sums in German. How I jot down a grocery list depends on where I shop: here in Denmark, I use Danish. When I visit Germany, German. A note reminding me to buy such-and-such Esperanto book I make in Esperanto.” And some nights, he dreams in Esperanto. “They seem to crop up after I’ve spent several days at one of the various get-togethers.”
Does he believe the language has a future? “I hope so. It’s like a legacy passed down through the generations.”
Stela, a sociologist in her twenties, is part of the new generation of native speakers. Stela is her Esperanto name. Hungarians call her Eszter. Her father was a French schoolteacher; her mother, a Budapest-based commercial translator. Both were dedicated Esperantists. Her father, though, had another life back in France. “He only visited my mother and me from time to time. You might say he was a character. His Esperanto was good, not perfect; he was always dropping his n’s.” Stela’s came from her mother, who learned to speak it faultlessly at university.
Stela, unlike Peter, remembers her first word. “My mother was pushing me somewhere in the buggy when I saw an oncoming tram, raised my index finger, and shouted Vidu! (‘Look!’).” Hungarian she learned to speak at school. “I never understood why my classmates thought my speaking Esperanto with my mother was so curious. Some of the other children spoke foreign languages at home: Russian, for example, or German.” At times she had trouble telling her two languages apart: “I would get my words mixed up. I would say pampelegér for ‘grapefruit’: a combination of the Esperanto pampelmuso and the Hungarian egér.”
Her bookish mother’s daughter, Stela read and read and read. Her bedroom shelves were crammed with colorful Esperanto books. One of her favorite titles, she told me, had been Kumeŭaŭa, la filo de la ĝangalo (Kumewawa, the Son of the Jungle), by the Hungarian Esperantist author Tibor Sekelj. She told me this quite offhandedly, without preliminaries, as though the story were a classic. And, when I googled for more details, I discovered to my astonishment that it was. A children’s adventure yarn, first published in 1979, and many times translated, it has enjoyed a long career throughout the globe’s bookshops. In Tokyo it was apparently once as big as The Little Prince. I managed to track down the original summary:
On the river Aragvajo, an affluent of the Amazon, a group of tourists is in danger. Their ship has sunk. A good thing Kumewawa steps forward to help them. “Fish we measure according to their length; men, according to their knowledge.” Kumewawa is only twelve years old, but belongs to the Karajxa tribe and knows everything there is to know about life in the jungle.
But despite Kumewawa’s escapades, the sinking ships and the daring rescues, Stela, like many of her generation, slowly lost interest in reading. “I wouldn’t recognize one of Zamenhof’s proverbs or expressions. I don’t have that culture. Some learners might, but for me the culture resides in my family and friends.” Curiously, her mother ceased using the language with her once she turned twenty. “She simply said to me: ‘I’ve taught you all I know.’ Before then the only time she spoke to me in Hungarian was when she lost her temper.” It is to her friends in the movement, her second family, that she feels closest. “Growing up, I failed to understand why the other Hungarians considered their summer holidays as purely family time. I always spent my summers overseas with other Esperantists.”
Both Peter and Stela wrote warmly of the movement’s various international meetings: in clubs, congresses, and other get-togethers. It was clear, from their differing accounts, that the meetings had varied over the years. In Peter’s day, they had been formal, requiring ties and good manners. Today, bare feet and bottles of plonk are everywhere to be seen. Peter’s generation had organized sparkly balls. Stela’s slaps tables with playing cards. Peter confided that the food, which students prepared for the attendees, was consistently bad: all grease and wilting vegetables; probably the badness of the food is one of the few things that hasn’t changed.
Certainly, Esperanto has changed. Its evolution is one of the things that animated Peter and Stela most. The evolution betokens an adaptive, natural-like language. Some changes, the smallest, have been motivated by technological advances: Peter long ago stopped saying kasedaparato (“cassette player”); the same sounds, with few alterations, he recycles these days to talk about the kafaparato (“coffee machine”). Text messaging has abbreviated the most common words: Stela texts k for kaj (“and”), bv for bonvolu (“please”), cx for ĉirkaŭ (“about”). Other modifications are cultural, born out of a youngster’s desire not to sound like Granny and Gramps. For Peter, something excellent is simply bonega (literally “greatly good”), whereas for Stela it is mojosa (“cool”). “I was at the teen meetup where it was first spoken,” Stela told me. The new word caught on fast. “Now at every youth event it’s mojosa this and mojosa that.”
The biggest and least reported shifts have been internal. Shades of meaning have progressively changed words. A hundred years ago, owing to the influence of Russian, boats and ships naĝis (“swam”); nowadays, they sail. The example is Jouko Lindstedt’s, an Esperantist linguist. Another such case concerns the word versajˆo (literally “a piece of verse”), which has long since been supplanted by poemo, a term that originally referred only to the epics. Also, the way words link up to convey more complex meanings has altered over the past hundred years, the phrases becoming progressively shorter. Zamenhof would have said something like ĝi estus estinta ebla (“it would have been possible”); Peter, to express the same thing, says ĝi estus eblinta; Stela says, ĝi eblintus. And with this evolution, the idea of a good Esperanto sentence—one that feels more Esperanto than another—has gradually emerged. Claude Piron—an influential figure in the movement—discouraged a sentence like en tiu epoko li praktikis sporton kun vigleco (“at that time he practiced sport with vigor”) in favor of the swifter tiuepoke li vigle sportis (literally “that-time-ly he vigorously sport-ed”).
Swifter, perhaps, but Piron’s sentence, like most in the language, remains confined to paper or a computer screen. Esperanto has always been an overwhelmingly written language. “Quite often, I require a few minutes to get into my normal flow when I speak Esperanto,” Stela admitted. “I’m forever writing in it, but speaking and writing aren’t the same thing.” That is why the congresses were so important to her and Peter. They provided momentary spaces in which to converse, but such conversations could hardly be altogether satisfying. Or natural. Many of the attendees were eternal beginners, forever glancing down at their notes as if standing at a podium. Misunderstanding was only ever a fluffed vowel away.
It is one thing to flex syntax. It is another thing to understand what is being said or written. Ken Miner, another Esperantist linguist, has written several papers—in Esperanto—in which he highlights ambiguities. Does the simple-looking sentence mi iris en la ĝardenon mean “I went into the garden” or “I was on my way into the garden”? Peter, when I asked him, thought the former, but Miner said quite a few other speakers, even the most experienced, disagree. In another paper, Miner discusses the suffix -ad. Textbooks tell learners that it indicates duration: kuri (“to run”), kuradi (“to run and run”). But Miner, burrowing into Esperanto literature, found plenty of sentences that contradicted the rule: li atendadis dum horoj (“he waited and waited for hours”) but pacientoj atendas dum monatoj (“patients wait for months”), where the first uses -ad to describe a wait lasting hours, but not the second for one that goes on and on for months.
These ambiguities and inconsistencies, explains Miner, are the result of non-natives having shaped Esperanto. Without a native speaker’s intuitions, Zamenhof and his first followers had had no choice but to rely on logic; languages, however, by their nature, are often illogical. The users’ judgments, each under the sway of their respective grammars (Polish, Russian, English, French… ), had clashed. To this day, they still do. Not even Peter and Stela can tell for sure whether certain sentences are right or wrong. Their intuitions, forged in a non-Esperanto-speaking society, are unreliable. Peter, at various points, told me as much. “Don’t think that native Esperanto speakers automatically speak flawlessly! There exist notable counterexamples.” Much depends on the parents’ degree of fluency. Some touted as natives, it turns out, speak only a kitchen Esperanto.
Miner’s research, Peter’s remarks: they came as something of a surprise. They ran counter to the confidence with which the movement promotes its “easy-to-learn” language. Peter, though, was unsurprised by my surprise: “About the average level among learners, I can only speak from experience. Most have little grasp of the language. Esperanto isn’t as easy as some of our adepts like to affirm.” Quirks and contradictions, no different from those that learners of any language encounter, are to blame. The Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko (the complete handbook of Esperanto grammar) spans some seven hundred pages. And when I looked again at the assertions the movement had published—“For a native English speaker, we may estimate that Esperanto is about five times as easy to learn as Spanish or French, ten times as easy to learn as Russian, twenty times as easy to learn as Arabic or spoken Chinese, and infinitely easier to learn than Japanese”—I felt that they were only salesman words, salesman numbers, without foundation.
One hundred and thirty years ago, Zamenhof’s stated goal had been ten million speakers—ten million to start with. When asked by an Associated Press reporter in 1983 to estimate the global number of speakers, the movement’s president, Grégoire Maertens, replied, “I usually say 10 million people read and understand Esperanto. Speaking is another thing. But then, how many people speak their own language correctly?” I believe this is wishful thinking. I cannot take seriously the claims made in the papers, that more speak Esperanto than speak Welsh or Icelandic; that it is on a par with Hebrew and Lithuanian. And none of the promoters seem to have taken into account population inflation: ten million in 1887 would be fifty million in 2017. No article, though, has printed a figure of fifty million, not even in the most enthusiastic columns of the Esperantist press. In linguistics circles, the actual figure of active, competent Esperanto speakers is estimated much, much lower. Ken Miner and his colleagues put it at fifty thousand. Fifty thousand, give or take, is the number who speak the Greenlandic Kalaallisut.
Humans everywhere use language, but only rarely choose which. Each is some person’s birthright. Peter and Stela were born into Esperanto, two of probably no more than a thousand such speakers. So why have the others, several tens of thousands, volunteered to master it? Not for any practical purpose: English, natural to hundreds of millions, has become the world’s primary medium of communication. Nor is it because Esperanto learns itself: It is as complex and capricious as any other language. Deeper needs—to stand out or apart, to flatter the conscience, to integrate into a tight-knit community—lie behind the learner’s decision. Esperanto simplifies the world, neatly divides it into two: on one side, all the men and women in the dark, those who have stopped up their ears, the trucklers to the powers-that-be; on the other, those who can truthfully say “Mi parolas Esperanton.”
A comforting abstraction, but Peter, at least, is old enough to know better. Once, during our many exchanges, I broached the subject of favorite words. I had unearthed a survey conducted among Esperantist writers, poets, and other personalities, and sent it to him. I thought it a way to get him talking about Esperanto’s emotional charge. I was wrong. Peter wrote back that words, by themselves, in whatever language, could never do justice to the world. It was what Stela had meant when she explained that her culture resided in her family and friends. “These sorts of lists leave me cold,” he wrote. “Why should mielo [“honey”] be considered a more beautiful word than marmelado? I have never seen or heard a najtingalo sing. But two winters ago, here in the Danish countryside, not far from my home, I taught a wild pheasant to eat out of my hand. For me, fazano has a much finer ring than najtingalo.”